Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  Many people believed that the Farben building had been spared, not because of a miraculous accident or the inherent inaccuracy of saturation bombing, but as a result of deliberate policy – to preserve this monolith for the post-war advantage of Germany’s conquerors, perhaps, or to unravel the secrets of Farben’s suspected wartime connection with American business and banking interests. Whatever the reason, the strange survival of the great Farben edifice was a manifold blessing for the Allies. Into its six wings and seven storeys moved all the departments and agencies for the promulgation of Occupation rule in the US Zone of Germany – Eisenhower’s office, SHAEF’s HQ, the Office of Military Government of the United States (later transferred to Berlin), UNRAA, the T Forces, everyone and everything. At the same time the Farben files were moved out of the parent building with the assistance of 500 prisoners-of-war and Farben employees and off-loaded next door to the other surviving edifice, the Reichsbank, the new headquarters of the FED.

  The FED was now the ultimate authority for financial affairs in post-war Germany. The huge underground vaults of this three-floor building housed all the rapidly swelling accumulation of valuables – the national reserves, SS loot, private hoards, European art treasures and the wealth of foreign states – seized by the Allied military authorities and brought back from caches all over Germany.

  A lot of work had been done on the Reichsbank building since the Americans took it over the month before. New glass had been put in the windows, fresh plaster on the walls, iron bars on the doors and an emergency tar paper roof over the south wing. Order and system had been introduced by the new masters. ‘In case of fire,’ one notice in the bank declared, ‘ring the German field telephone in front of the main vault and report to the person answering at Frankfurt Civilian Fire Department: “FIRE Reichsbank”. Note: There is no one at the Civilian Fire Department who speaks English.’

  So large was the inflow of treasure that the bank’s existing underground vaults had to be considerably enlarged. The main basis of the treasure trove in the FED vaults was the huge cache found at Merkers and brought to Frankfurt in 11,750 containers on 15 April. As further shipments followed – over a hundred all told, most of them from the US Zone of Germany – these vaults filled up almost to the ceilings and overflowed into secondary strongrooms that had formerly been used as air raid shelters.

  The pressure of space was so great that currencies and other valuables recovered between mid-July and early September 1945 had to be held in other Reichsbanks in the US Zone until room could be found for them in the FED. The total value of all the assets held in the FED vaults was thought to be well in excess of $500,000,000. Up to October 1946 Allied investigations had discovered and confiscated some 220 tons of Nazi gold in Germany and located a further 50 tons in Switzerland and 7 tons in Sweden. By then the concentration of treasure held at the FED was said to be the largest single collection of wealth in the world, with the possible exception of Fort Knox – no one seemed quite sure which was the greater. The gold holdings alone, valued at approximately $350,000,000, were second only to those at Fort Knox.

  Among the more spectacular sights in the FED vaults were the rooms filled with gold bars stacked three deep from wall to wall, each bar weighing 251b and worth $15,000. In one cage there was a gold nugget the size of a grapefruit, the biggest nugget ever seen. In another was some of the gold of the German Foreign Office, a portion of the so-called ‘Ribbentrop Gold’ hoard, and in another virtually the entire Hungarian gold reserves. Several compartments in the vaults were filled with gold coins of a number of nations. One large room contained 200 suitcases and trunks full of the infamous SS loot which included 600lb of gold fillings extracted from the mouths of murder camp victims. Two other rooms in the air raid shelter vaults were stacked to the ceilings with another kind of SS loot – boxes and boxes of cheap alarm clocks. There were compartments housing boxes of cut diamonds (17,000 carats worth $10,000,000), super-precious metals such as platinum, iridium, palladium and rhodium, the crown jewels of the Hungarian and Hohenzollern dynasties, and eight million dollars’ worth of counterfeit English pound notes in denominations from £5 to £100 pounds, all neatly stacked and bills-trapped as if they had just come from the printing press, and almost indistinguishable (according to Bank of England experts who examined them) from genuine ones.

  Just how much all the stuff in the FED vaults was worth nobody knew because nobody knew exactly what was in the FED vaults anyway. Initially the FED served simply as a store-house. The task of producing an evaluated inventory of the mountainous assets of the FED was daunting in the extreme and beyond the limited resources of the FED’s staff at the end of the war. To describe and catalogue the treasure in its entirety was work for experts, and there were simply not enough of them and probably never could be. Many of the items were very small but immensely valuable and these alone could involve experts in gemstones and jewellery labouring away for months on an inventory without making any appreciable progress towards the completion of their work. The problem was compounded into a kind of Catch 22 situation by the fact that such work could only be accomplished under strict security controls designed to prevent loss – ‘not a simple problem,’ as one FED official commented, ‘when it is considered that no one knows what is in the depository now’. In other words, work on the inventory of the FED could ideally only begin when it was known what the depository contained, but no one could know what the depository contained until work on the inventory had begun. This fact was of crucial significance in the development of this story, for it entailed a fatal delay before the discovery that a considerable portion of the Reichsbank reserves had gone missing.

  Inventoried or not, the FED treasure at the Frankfurt Reichsbank clearly demanded the most elaborate security system possible. To ensure the external security of the bank premises, barbed wire barriers and floodlights were flung up around the outside of the building and the single entrance to the bank and approaches to the vaults were guarded by a company of the 29th Infantry Division. The internal security system was based on that used in the US mints. Only persons possessing passes signed by the Chief of the Currency Branch were allowed to approach the vault entrances. There was a triple control over the main vaults and a dual control over all the other strongrooms. The door to the main vault had a combination lock known only to three officers, each of whom carried keys to dual locks under his exclusive control, and no person could enter any vault or strongroom unless two of the three officers were present.

  In spite of these stringent precautions, two thefts did subsequently occur inside the FED vaults – once when a DP labourer palmed a small bag of ten Austrian gold crowns (worth $6,200) while some boxes of coin were being inventoried, and again when four other DPs stole 197,200 Allied military marks while the supervising officers’ attention was distracted during the transfer of currency from one strongroom to another. But in the main the principal preoccupation of the FED staff was not with what might go out of their overburdened vaults but what ought to be coming in. And this, it was already becoming clear by early May 1945, was not entirely sufficient.

  The interrogation of arrested Reichsbank officials and the perusal of captured Reichsbank documents indicated to Colonel Bernstein and his Gold Rush officers that of the Reichsbank branches which had previously stored more than 17 million dollars’ worth of Reichsbank gold only three had actually yielded recoveries – 246 gold bars to be exact, and worth some $3,000,000. That still left over $14,000,000 of gold unaccounted for. Subsequently $500,000 worth was reported in Regensburg and nearly $3,500,000 worth (comprising 90 bars of bullion worth $1,278,000 and 147 bags of coin worth $2,156,375) was in Russian hands in Berlin. The Reichsbank records captured at Magdeburg indicated that in the first half of April most of the remainder of the gold, totalling $10,000,000, had been hastily evacuated to Berlin from six branches in central Germany and then shipped south on a trail which, according to reliable Reichsbank officials, led deep into the mountains somewhere in s
outhern Germany.

  The next step was to follow that trail into the Alps. By now Colonel Bernstein was deeply preoccupied with the complex decartelisation investigation of German heavy industry, which came under the wing of his Financial Branch, and he was shortly off to Washington for discussions with President Truman on this subject. He therefore relinquished the responsibility of tracking the Reichsbank treasure to its final resting place to the junior member of his original Gold Rush party, Lieutenant Herbert G. DuBois, a young officer who was to occupy a prominent position on the stage in the next two weeks and thereafter vanish almost without trace into total obscurity. For almost nothing can be discovered about him. It is known that at the time he followed the treasure trail down to Bavaria he was working for SHAEF’s Financial Intelligence Section (in the sub-section designated Foreign Exchange, Blocking and Property Control). It is thought that he spoke fluent German (and wrote fluent English) and it was said that he came from Paris – which could either mean that he was French (like his surname) or merely that he had previously worked in Paris at SHAEF headquarters (which is in any case likely). Judging by his junior rank he was presumably young and presumably had some sort of fiscal background – perhaps in banking, like some of his colleagues. He was obviously highly competent and very conscientious and hard working. But where he came from before he briefly stepped into the spotlight to play out his part in the Reichsbank mystery is as obscure a matter as where he went to afterwards. The curiously unworldly nature of his mission seems to have engaged his fancy at any rate. When he had completed his fairy-tale task he gave his official report a fairy-tale title: ‘In Quest of Gold, Silver and Foreign Exchange’. This report seems to have been Herbert DuBois’ only permanent bequest to posterity – if a secret document that remained hidden unseen in the archives for the next thirty-five years could be described in this way.

  Lieutenant DuBois set out on his quest on 8 May 1945. Frankfurt had been in American hands for over a month, Munich and Mittenwald for a week – and the President of the Reichsbank, Walther Funk, for two days. Though he makes absolutely no mention of the fact, the day DuBois chose to set off was a momentous day for the American Army, a dreadful one for the German people, and a milestone in the history of the world. May 8th was VE-Day. At General Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims on the previous morning the German forces in the west had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, with effect from midnight that night. The first stage of DuBois’ quest, therefore, entailed driving from one euphoric American military post to another through a conquered populace plunged into the most abject melancholy and despair. In the major garrison towns there were full-dress parades and victory march-pasts, salutes, flags, bull and super chow. For Lieutenant DuBois there were K-rations (one labelled Breakfast, one Lunch, one Dinner, complete with cigarettes, gum and toilet paper), chlorinated water, make-shift quarters and the first of many onerous interviews in the pursuit of his difficult mission. On VE-Day he got no further than Heidelberg, where he was to discuss his plans with the Finance Officer at 6th Army Group Headquarters. The next morning he departed for Munich and the south.

  DuBois travelled in a US Army staff car, a sedan, with a driver, an armed GI guard, a German-speaking fellow officer, and the Gold team’s peripatetic German companion, Albert Thoms, the gold and precious metal expert from Berlin. Driving a car round Germany once the war was over was an exhilarating and adventurous business and there were many difficulties along the road.

  Germany in that first summer of peace – and for a long time afterwards – was a civilisation in torment. In the moment of hiatus that followed the German surrender – that absolute rock-bottom moment of nothingness the Germans were to call ‘die Stunde Null’, hour zero – Germany presented a scene without precedent in modern times, a surrealist tableau of disaster. It was a land of ruins peopled by ghosts, a land without government, order or purpose, without industry, communications or proper means of existence, a nation that had entirely forfeited its nationhood and lay entirely at the beck and call of foreign armies. Hardly any of the great cities of Germany had escaped the destruction of the air raids or the land fighting. An estimated 400 million cubic feet of rubble covered the devastated areas. Many of the great public buildings and much of the infrastructure of a once-great industrial nation had been erased as well. The almost complete cessation of the means of communication – post, phone, railways, motor transport – seemed to have brought civilised life itself to a halt.

  And yet, paradoxically, the rolling German countryside looked spring-like, beautiful and untouched by war in the warm, summery weather of VE plus 1. The autobahn down to Munich ran through a pastoral Lebensraum, all vineyards and orchards and pine forests, wayside crucifixes, milk cows pulling carts, medieval villages with smoke curling gently from the chimneys. The only reminders of battle were the one-legged men and the trucks full of ragged DPs, a few burnt-out tanks dotted about the meadows, and an occasional plane pancaked at the edge of the freeway. In sunlight even the ruins of the cities – Stuttgart, Ulm, Augsburg – seemed less oppressive to the spirit, and the stink from the rotting corpses buried beneath the rubble grew less with each day that went by, though some streets were still labelled ‘Gruesome’. And now it was peacetime – no more killing, no more blackout, no more curfew for troops. All signs of Germany’s recent past had already miraculously vanished – there were no more Nazi slogans to be seen, no more portraits of Hitler hanging in rooms, no more ‘Adolf Hitler Strasse’ plaques on the walls of streets.

  The American occupation was still in its infancy but already a visitor from some other part of Germany – from the British Zone, for example – would have noticed the burgeoning idiosyncrasies of the American military style. Billboards were already going up beside the two-lane concrete autobahns along which DuBois and his party headed, pumping road sense and courtesies in curious rhyming couplets. ‘BRING IN YOUR JEEP,’ drivers running out of petrol were advised, ‘WE NEVER SLEEP’; and ‘WE’VE GOT OIL AND GAS, SO PLEASE DON’T PASS.’ ‘DON’T BE A SAP – PULL IN AND NAP. SAVE WEAR AND TEAR – LET’S CHECK YOUR AIR.’ Sometimes the tenor of the billboards changed. ‘SOLDIERS WISE DON’T FRATERNISE!’ declared some, warning the troops against forming friendships with Germans, and especially German girls. Under one a GI intent on sowing a few oats had scribbled: ‘THIS DON’T MEAN ME, BUDDY.’ Every few miles the sign ‘BRIDGE OUT’ forced military traffic off the autobahn and on to complicated detours round blown bridges which had not yet been repaired, along corduroy roads, mud tracks and open fields, or over makeshift Bailey-bridges across creeks and rivers, double-tracked affairs resting on rubber pontoons that billowed slowly up and down in the waves.

  The road was full of people – people on foot, people on bikes, people driving horse carts, people pulling soap boxes on wheels, scruffy, liberation-happy DPs going home after years of slave labour; weary German civilians on the great trek from the east, their faces blank and unresponsive; long columns of surrendered German soldiers trudging towards some vast open-air prisoner of war cage in their dishevelled Feldgrau; American transport convoys of jeeps, trucks, 6 x 6 pick-ups and half-tracks grinding ceaselessly along in both directions, loaded with soldiers, stores and secreted Fräuleins. At the end of the war all Europe was on the move. Sixty million people had been uprooted from their homes in a displacement of peoples without parallel in the history of the human race. Now they were coming home. Germany became the arena for a vast tableau vivant as refugees of all kinds including millions of former slave labourers and concentration camp survivors and countless million homeless German evacuees, returning prisoners of war, refugees and expellees from the East – made their various ways north, south, east and west across the land. To the visitor this vast ragged army of people on the move was one of the most unforgettable impressions of Germany in defeat. Men collected cigarette ends in gutters. Children begged for candy from the occupation troops. Girls slowly cruised the pavements trying to catch a soldier’s eye, hoping
for food in exchange for sex. Filthy and tattered ex-Wehrmacht men, many minus a leg or arm, their eyes blank, empty food tins tied to the strings that girt their waists, their feet bound with sacking, hobbled around the ruins in a desperate search for their families, work and shelter.

  Lieutenant DuBois and his party neared Munich in late afternoon. Munich was in Third Army territory and Third Army was known to have the snappiest Military Police in the European Theatre. Huge new signs bearing the Third Army emblem now appeared at the roadside: ‘YOU ARE NOW ENTERING 3RD ARMY TERRITORY. TRAFFIC LAWS STRICTLY IN FORCE.’ Then smaller signs spaced at 100-yard intervals, like Burma Shave signs back in the States: ‘MOTOR CYCLES, ¼ TONS, SEDANS’. ‘40 MILES’. With the signs came the MPs, hunting for traffic violators and German Army deserters, forever prying into vehicles and checking papers – above all papers. ‘Paper is a passport to anywhere,’ noted a visiting British T-Force Colonel. ‘If you want a meal, a billet or a car in the American Zone they merely say “Have you got orders?” and you brandish a bundle and they say “OK” and fix you up. My bundle (maps, travel booklets and spare notepaper) is much more impressive than my T-Force pass since the latter merely authorised me to obtain “papers” from God knows where – and it is “papers” that matter.’